Dr. Raines taught religion at Temple University in Philadelphia
at the time this article was written. He is coauthor of Modern Work and
Human Meaning (Westminster, 1986). This article appeared in the Christian
Century, January 18, 1984, p. 52. Copyright by the Christian Century
Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription
information can be found at www.christiancentury.org.
This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

The first time that I met a survivor
ofthe Holocaust was in the summer of
1964 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The Civil Rights Bill had recently been
passed by Congress, and, along with other students from the North, I was in
Mississippi helping blacks register to vote.

It was, by virtually everyone’s
reckoning, a mean and vicious time. The Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens
Councils did their dirty work unhindered by police restraint. Earlier that
summer three civil rights workers had been murdered: a local black, James
Chaney, and two young Jewish men from New York, Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner, had been shot, crushed by a bulldozer and then buried under a dam in
Philadelphia, Mississippi. Local whites were either furious with us, calling us
“communists” and “outside agitators,” or, if more favorable, terrified into
silence and avoidance. Time and again we would approach local white clergymen,
only to be treated as if we didn’t exist.

The only exception to this pattern was
the head of the music department at what was then the all-white University of
Southern Mississippi. He invited a group of us civil rights workers to his home
one evening, where perhaps a dozen other white sympathizers were gathered. They
were all frightened. If it became known that they had met with us, they faced
certain social ostracism, and perhaps even the loss of their jobs. That was
especially true for our host, who was Jewish and spoke with a thick German
accent. His university administration was highly politicized and terrified of
local reprisal. I asked him why he was taking such a risk. His reply was brief,
and devastating: “You see, I come from Auschwitz.”

Whether they were learned 40 years ago in
Warsaw, or 20 years ago along the hot and dusty roads of Mississippi, Alabama
and Georgia, the lessons of righteous resistance are universal. They belong not
to one but to all people who struggle for their dignity. Among the resisters of
our own time and place, one name stands out above all the rest -- Martin Luther
King, Jr. As King wrote in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. What affects one
directly, affects all indirectly.” King’s words and actions teach us invaluable
lessons about resistance.

First, we learn from him that before
there can be opposition to a situation of oppression, that situation must be
recognized and named as oppressive. The first act of resistance is to gain
clarity about one’s own situation, and unity of purpose among the oppressed.
But that is not easy.

Lord Acton once said, “Power tends to
corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But powerlessness also corrupts.
In situations of oppression both the oppressors and, often, the oppressed lose
moral clarity. The powerful lose this clarity because part of their power is
the power to define their social situation. The established social explanations
of an era are always the explanations of the establishment. Into these
explanations the mighty build their own self-interests and biases. Thus, their
view of reality is always biased. Their power renders them morally pretentious
and blind to their own ethical obtuseness.

But powerlessness also can lead to lack
of clarity. The terrible temptation for the powerless is to believe what the
oppressors say about them -- to think of themselves as “dumb,” “weak” and
“lazy.” The corruption of powerlessness is that the oppressed may come to envy
and seek to emulate the oppressor, dreaming of someday taking the oppressor’s
place.

When this happens a terrible silence and
isolation opens up among the powerless. Dreaming of becoming like the mighty,
they fear and flee the wounds of their oppressed fellows, because those wounds
remind them of their own degradation. The deepest and most devastating injury
of oppression is that it produces mute suffering -- suffering that cannot even
name its own situation, cannot cry out, cannot say how things really are,
cannot protest.

Martin
Luther King, Jr., knew that clarity alone can bring community among the
oppressed. And clarity comes when the downtrodden protest their oppression in
the name of their own dignity, deciding not to dream of becoming someone
else, but to stand together with their own kind.

On Monday December 5,1955, Martin
Luther King, Jr., newly appointed head of the Montgomery Improvement
Association, stood behind his pulpit in that Alabama city and urged its black
citizens to join together in a bus boycott to protest the indignity of
segregated seating.

He issued a call for moral clarity, a call to
rise up out of apathy and despair:

There comes a time when people get tired. We are
here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are
tired -- tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about
by the brutal feet of oppression. We have no alternative but to protest. For
many years we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white
brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come
here tonight to be saved, to be saved less than freedom and justice.

Until that evening few had ever heard of
King. Now he stood barely 100 yards from the capital of the old Confederacy,
surrounded by a vast sea of racial prejudice. But King knew that although
righteous resistance can be defeated, it can never be silenced. He knew that
the long arm of history bends toward justice. And so he concluded his speech by
claiming the future:

If we protest
courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books
are written in the future, somebody will have to say, “There lived a race of
people, of black people, of people who had the moral courage to stand up for
their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history
and civilization.”

King was right. When resistance breaks
forth, when the oppressed protest their situation, they do introduce a new
meaning and a new possibility, both for themselves and for those who oppress
them. Resistance leads toward freedom -- for the enslaved, but also for those
who are so lost in the pretensions of their power that they do not know
themselves as enslavers.

If the first task of resistance, then, is
to see things as they really are, to stop dreaming and to stand together, the
second step is to claim moral authority for one’s cause. Resisters need to
proclaim the righteousness of their purpose in terms which are widely, if not
universally, recognized. At first this claim may be greeted with silence, and
the protesters may stand alone. But the appeal is never futile. That protest
against inhumanity and indignity will echo, and this echoing cannot be
silenced. The moral ideals in whose name the resistance is undertaken are
ideals shared by others. They fire the ethical imagination not just of the
resisters, but of all those who try to make moral sense of their lives. Thus
righteous resisters may be defeated, but they never fail, for their memory
lives on and gives birth to other quests for justice.

In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,”
King spoke to the white clergy of that city, but also to the nation and to the
world. He linked black resistance to oppression in the South to the very
meaning of America -- indeed, to the meaning of humanity. Wrote King:

We will reach the goal
of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America
is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with
America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before
the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of
Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two
centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages. . . . If the
inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the oppression we now
face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of
our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

The
thirdtask of resistance is even more difficult. It is to resist
despair, to resist giving in to the terrible prices of the struggle -- the
loss of friends, the stubbornness of evil, the inevitable weariness -- and to
resist giving up hope when early victories become clouded by defeat, the way
becomes difficult, and the goal seems ever more distant.

At first, things went well for Martin
Luther King, Jr. From an unknown Baptist preacher leading a bus boycott in
1955, he became, just nine years later, the acknowledged moral leader of our
country, standing in the oval office of the White House for the signing of the
historic Civil Rights Act. In 1964, he also received a Nobel Peace Prize -- an
event that galled certain people in high authority in Washington.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover feared and
detested King and fought to have him made a major target of FBI investigation.
At last his second in command, William Sullivan, wrote his boss a memo that
opened the door: “I believe [King] stands head and shoulders over all other
Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of
Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most
dangerous Negro of the future of this nation from the standpoint of Communism,
the Negro, and national security.”

Hoover had FBI agents tap King’s
telephone, trying to gather evidence to discredit him. When agents made a
clandestine tape that caught the civil rights leader in a compromising
situation, Hoover gleefully released it to certain confidants in the press. He
even had a copy sent to Mrs. King, while a note was forwarded to King
suggesting that the only honorable thing for him to do now was to commit
suicide.

Hoover and Sullivan were not King’s only
detractors. After Stokely Carmichael’s call for “black power,” divisions began
to appear within the black community. Uncertainty grew over whether King’s
vision of an integrated America was possible or even desirable. Many of the
younger leaders of the protest movement spoke of King as a “has-been.” In the
‘60s the ghettos of the North were erupting in fiery riots, and many saw
nonviolent resistance as a thing of the past.

Of deep concern to King was the emergence
of black separatism as an ideology, and along with it the use of anti-Semitism
as a recruiting device for separatist liberation movements.

Mayor Robert Wagner of New York City,
faced with a riot in Harlem, asked King to come North for consultations. It was
a disastrous trip for King. He was booed in Harlem, and bombarded with
anti-Semitic epithets. He told the mayor and police commissioner that what was
needed was “an honest soul-searching analysis and evaluation of the
environmental causes which have spawned the riots.” He told black anti-Semites,
“I solemnly pledge to do my utmost to uphold the fair name of Jews. Not only
because we need their friendship, and surely we do, but mainly because bigotry
in any form is an affront to us all.”

And, of course, there was always the
southern segregationists’ vicious, often violent opposition to King and all he
stood for, The cry of “black power” was echoed by a call for “white power” in
some parts of the white community. J. B. Stoner, vice-presidential candidate of
the National State’s Rights Party, came to St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964 to
attend a segregationist rally. To cheers of defiance, Stoner cried out: “Tonight
we’re going to find out whether white people have any rights. The coons have
been parading around St. Augustine for a long time. Now we whites are going to
march. And no ‘Martin Luther Coon’ -- that longtime associate of communists --
and no Jew-stacked communist-loving Supreme Court is going to stop us!”

Whether North or South,
the language of the land began to turn sour and grow mean. Bigotry was on the
rise. The prices of the struggle were mounting, and the road seemed endless. In
his speech at Montgomery, Alabama, concluding, the long march from Selma, King
asked, “How long?” How long would the struggle take? He answered his own
question as follows:

. . . however difficult
the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth
pressed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live
forever. How long? Not long, because you will reap what you sow. How long? Not
long, because the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends toward
justice. . . .

King urged resisters to resist their own
despair, and march on.

When faced with absolute evil, there is
probably little one can do except either to defy and resist absolutely, or to
die quietly. But most oppressive situations are not absolute. King saw that in
most instances protest is not an end in itself, but an instrument of
reconciliation. This is the fourth lesson about resistance that we can learn
from King; he showed us that although nonviolent resistance has a No in it, its
Yes is more important. It is the Yes of honesty, of a nation restored and able
to live with its own conscience. It is the Yes of that justice which is the
beginning of friendship, and the end of the terrible waste of injustice and
oppression.

A tremendous insight of King’s was that
the oppressed have a moral mission to the oppressor. It is when the powerless
realize this that they transcend their demoralization and dependency and assume
responsibility for themselves. But more than that, they take on the far larger
dignity of becoming moral agents of history.

The danger for resisters is that in the
heat of the battle they will wound their own souls by becoming overwhelmed with
the passion for revenge. For King, nonviolent resistance was far from the
spirit of retaliation. It bore. instead, the spirit of Jesus and of Gandhi,
seeking the reconciliation of the injured with the injurer. When Jesus told his
followers to “pray for those who persecute you,” it was not in the spirit of
subservience. As Gandhi and King both knew, taking on moral responsibility for
those who hurt one is the highest form of dignity, the greatest example of
strength.

Moreover, in situations where one faces
relative rather than absolute evil, nonviolent resistance is the most promising
instrument of success. The oppressor can be led to discover that his own best
interest is not in keeping others down, locked in poverty and misery that are
both financially wasteful and morally disastrous. Nonviolent resisters can help
both the oppressor and the oppressed begin to dream a new dream, a more honest
dream -- the dream of a new future made stronger for all because it is fairer
for all. Twenty years ago Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial, and before the largest crowd of witnesses for America that Washington
had ever seen he talked about his dream – “a dream that one day on the red
hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners
will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

The spirit of revenge is easy -- not as
easy, perhaps, as is the spirit of abject surrender. But reconciliation takes
real courage -- the courage not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil
with good. That happens when people find a common dream.

The last lesson Martin Luther King, Jr.,
has to teach us is also the most difficult, the most serious. Resisters come at
last to face the ultimate challenge, the fear of death.

Early in his career, King had said, “If
you don’t have something worth dying for, you can’t live free.” This strange freedom
that comes to those who, in the face of death, say “Here I stand” is the
freedom to live free from fear. It is the steadiness and calm that come when
one knows that to this duty and to this place one has been called, and that
death itself cannot stop one.

King went to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968
to march in solidarity with that city’s trash collectors, who had gone on
strike for decent wages. He saw this act as the beginning of a whole new phase
in his resistance movement. He saw that in a country where 20 per cent of the
population owns 80 per cent of the wealth and where, when times turn hard, the
middle class is tempted to vent its frustrations by blaming and punishing the
poor, a civil rights movement must also become a movement for economic justice.

Going to Memphis was a dangerous thing
for King to do. First protesting against segregation, then the war in Vietnam,
and now saying No to the way work and wealth are distributed in our society
made him suspect to many. Some earlier friends began to wonder, and earlier
enemies began to plot.

All through his years of resistance there
had been threats against his life. He had narrowly escaped being killed when a
woman crazed by poverty had stabbed him in Harlem, But in the winter and spring
of 1968, the threats became more ominous. There were rumors of a $50,000 bounty
on his head.

Still, the Memphis protest was a new
level of resistance that King felt he had to undertake. What good is a
desegregated lunch counter when you can’t afford the meal? What do federal
regulations desegregating housing mean when you can’t afford a house? What does
the right to work with people of all races mean when you can’t find a job? King
saw that for the vast majority of black Americans, their fundamental oppression
was not that they were black, but that they were poor -- last hired, first
fired, locked out of the American dream, living in a vast twilight zone of
joblessness and hopelessness.

On the night before King died, he made
his final speech. He told his fellow protesters:

Like anybody I would
like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about
that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the
mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there
with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the
Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not
fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. I
have a dream this afternoon that the brotherhood of man will become a reality.
With this faith, we will be able to achieve this new day, when all of God’s
children -- black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and
Catholics -- will be able to join hands and sing with the Negroes in the
spiritual of old. ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty we are free
at last.’’

At five minutes after six on the evening
of April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot
dead.

On March 25, just ten days before he was
killed, King had met with the annual Rabbinical Assembly in the Catskill
Mountains of New York. The rabbis gave him a special greeting that evening,
singing “We Shall Overcome” in Hebrew. An old friend and ally, theologian
Abraham Heschel, introduced him to the assembly, saying: “Martin Luther King is
a voice, a vision and a way. . . . I call upon every Jew to harken to his
voice, to share his vision, to follow in his way, The whole future of America
will depend upon the impact and influence of Dr. King.” Heschel’s words are
true for all of us still.

It’s not difficult to silence a good man.
But it is very difficult to silence a good man’s dream, because it becomes the
dream of others. You can kill good people, but you can’t kill goodness. As King
well knew, the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.